The Golden Hour (6 page)

We walked slowly down the vineyard row to the end. The bird was strangely subdued, its eyes staring straight ahead. After ten minutes or so of walking, we emerged from a grove of walnut trees and saw the taxidermist’s house in front of us. The yard was strewn with old pieces of wood, scattered with feathers and bones. The carcass of a long-eared rabbit was thrown up against the stucco wall.

“Maurizio! Are you here?”

We heard rustling inside; the door opened. The taxidermist was unshaven, his gray hair nearly shoulder-length. His clothes were stained and ill fitting. “What have we here?” he asked slowly. His voice was warm. He gingerly took the hawk from my arms, holding it much as I had, examining its wings. “Well, I guess you’ve lost half your wind power, old fella,” he said.

“Can you fix his wing?” I asked him.

“I expect so,” he said. “Seen this before. Couple of months, he’ll be good as new.”

Later that night, over dinner, I told the story eagerly to our parents.

Mother shook her head, clearly mystified by such a strange encounter. “You must be careful,” she said to me. “They could be carrying parasites or foreign germs.”

“Good for you, Giorgio,” Father had said absentmindedly. “It’s not easy to handle a wild creature like that.” Giorgio said nothing.

“But, Papa, I’m the one who picked it up. I’m the one who wanted to save it.”

He smiled. “Yes,
piccola.
I’m sure you were important. You probably helped give Giorgio enough courage to act.”

“But no!” I was bursting with desperation and righteousness. “It was
me,
Papa. Giorgio was too scared to touch the bird.” I shot my brother a defiant look.

“Well, I expect we’ll hear from Maurizio when it’s ready to fly, won’t we? Now, Giorgio, I’m thinking you’re ready to go for a turkey shoot with me this fall. Would you like that?”

My eyes filled with tears. I looked at Giorgio, who would not look back at me. My parents went on eating, mopping up their pasta sauce with slices of bread. It was clear to me that, as a girl, I simply couldn’t measure up to my brother in Papa’s eyes. Mother said nothing, seemed to notice nothing. This was a battle I would have to take on myself.

I didn’t blame Giorgio, not really. I knew he needed Father’s respect as much as I did. I drifted back to the rough feel of Klaus’s jacket against my cheek, the scent of roses, the ominous sound of the owl that hooted overhead.
They are the enemy,
I thought, as a vision of Mathilde rocking her baby pulled me gently into sleep.

I
was in the back of the cafeteria, washing the cotton smocks the children wore over their clothes at school, when Klaus passed through the kitchen and came up behind me. I was fully aware he was there, but I said nothing. When I finally turned around to look, he smiled, giving me a conspiratorial wink. Meeting his eyes made my face go hot, so I looked down at his belt, to the holster that hung from it. I had never seen a gun so close. I reached out and lightly fingered its handle. He covered my finger with his hand and held it there. I shuddered, a little afraid.

“I haven’t seen you since our walk in the garden,” he said in a low voice.

“Why do you wear a gun inside, in the school?” I asked.

He looked surprised, as if he’d never thought about it. “Well, I guess I just need to be ready for anything.”

“But nothing in here ever calls for guns, does it?”

“You are right about that.” He looked down at me steadily. A chill flashed down my back, and I felt my face flush.

“Have you ever killed someone?”

“What kind of question is this?” He squinted at me skeptically. “You do not really want to know.”

“Yes, I do, Klaus. I want to know what it’s like.”

“Well, I did, yes, in Russia. More than once.”

“You told me the other day that the German army was much superior to the Italians. Why is that?”

“Come, Giovanna. Please do not talk of these things.”

“No, tell me. What was wrong with the Italians?”

He bent down and whispered in my ear, “I like Italians. You most of all.”

I shivered and raised my face to look at him. “I’m not supposed to like Germans.”

“But you do?” He cradled my face in both his hands.

“No, I…”

He turned to look quickly behind him, then kissed me full on the mouth. I was surprised, but then…his lips were so soft. I reached up to clasp my hands behind his neck, when suddenly he pulled back, breaking my grasp, and walked away.

The truth is, I didn’t really like working with children. I liked going to the school every day, because it made me feel useful and gave structure to my life. But in the mornings, dealing with screaming six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds made me want to scream myself. I marveled at Sister Graziella’s patience, at Sister Elena’s ability to maintain discipline, but I just couldn’t emulate them. I got bored within minutes of each day’s beginning.

Ironically it was my job to entertain the children who weren’t working on reading or writing with the sisters. I had to oversee their games and mediate their squabbles. They annoyed me with dull questions: “Why is dust brown?” or “What is war?” or “Can I hold one of the soldiers’ guns?” I got so sick of chasing after them on the playground, tired of having to listen to them all the time, of
keeping them amused, and, most of all, of having to be an example of dignity and restraint.

While the children made me feel bored and juvenile, the lieutenant made me feel like an adult. He showed me an empty, windowless office down the hall from his, one whose door was normally kept shut. He took me in there once, and gradually we began to steal off for longer and longer sessions in each other’s company, especially in the afternoons, when the children were gone. No one was the wiser when the two of us occasionally stole inside that office and closed the door behind us.

I was enthralled by his stories—of his school days in Germany, of his best friends who joined him at engineering school, of training for the army. I was flattered that he took the time to tell me so much. We spoke in low voices so no one would hear, and now and then—at the sound of footsteps outside in the hall—we would hold our breath and look away from each other, at the floor. Sometimes, in the interludes between stories, we would kiss, gently—long, soft kisses, holding hands and sometimes embracing. At times, I was filled with such warm feelings of closeness and intimacy that I could forget he was a German soldier.

“I think I’m falling a little in love with you,” he said one day between kisses.

“Why?” I asked. “You’re married to Mathilde. You’re so much older than I am.”

He thought for a moment. “I love your dark hair and dark eyes. They are warm and exotic to me,” he said. “You are so young, so innocent, so undiscovered, like buried treasure. I know you have a fire inside of you, and I want to see it come out.”

I began to feel I could trust him, so I started to tell him how I was dreaming of a better role for myself in the war. I described my best friend, Violetta, who had been receiving training as a nurse. I added that I thought work dealing with injured and dying soldiers seemed more important than correcting children’s papers. But he
suddenly turned to me with the flash of a new, rough, frightening look. “Where exactly is she working with these soldiers? A clinic? Tell me, Giovanna. Is it near to here?”

I looked away. “I have no idea where she is going to work.” Luckily, he let it drop.

The nearby farmhouse where Tonino and his wife, Catarina, lived provided a welcome escape from our family’s cramped quarters. The scent of fresh bread filled the air when I stopped by one morning in early June to visit Catarina. She was doing her weekly baking and had just pulled back the flat iron cover of the deep wood oven. “I was hoping you’d stop by today. I have something for you.” She placed four loaves on the table to cool and then felt behind the rusty tin of salt on a high shelf and took out a tightly folded piece of paper. I slowly unfolded a lined sheet that looked like it had been torn from a school tablet. Scrawled across it was a message—in Giorgio’s handwriting:
Giovanna—come after church on Sunday to the old gazebo.

I stared at the words. “Where did you get this, Catarina? We haven’t heard from my brother in months. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

“The wheat farmer’s son gave it to me earlier this week. He said he had seen Giorgio,” Catarina said.

“Did he say where he saw him? Is he nearby? Were there others with him?”

Catarina looked away, embarrassed. “I…guess I never asked.” She turned her back to me. “He was such a good friend of Pietro’s. Ever since my son died, it’s been so hard for me to be with his friends. I guess I just wanted to get away. I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, Catarina, I understand. I really do. It doesn’t matter. I can ask him myself now.” I smiled and gave her a hug. “Thank you so much for this.”

“You can trust me not to say a word.”

All I could think about was seeing Giorgio the next day, but Saturday-afternoon confession intruded. Visiting Don Federico was getting complicated. I had made my confession to him for years, reciting my sins of the week. He was an old friend of our family—a gentle, kind man whose hair had turned all white and who had to wear thick glasses to see the scripture and words of the mass on Sunday mornings. I knew he couldn’t hear too well either, but still, I had to be careful of what I said.

As I entered the narrow booth, I remembered a previous Saturday. I had mentioned taking a walk with “someone Papa didn’t approve of,” but I hadn’t added that he was a German soldier.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” I kept my eyes on the floor, avoiding the grille behind which I could picture the piercing, inquisitive eyes of Don Federico. “I was impatient with the children at the School of Santa Maria, where I work.” I paused, took a full breath to lend conviction to my voice. “I…felt almost like kissing someone—a man—at the school.” I rushed to add, “But he is a German soldier, so I know I must not think of such things.”

Don Federico’s absolution had been unusually fervent, my penance unusually stiff.

These little transgressions seemed to me back then to be tiny things, insignificant in the face of the havoc that surrounded us all. There was the nearly constant sound of Allied planes overhead en route to their bombing raids; canvas-covered jeeps and lorries carving deep ruts in the country roads; uniformed soldiers in khaki or camouflage with rifles slung over their shoulders standing in every crowd, on every corner. People were dying every day, and the nearby forests teemed with partisans who sabotaged the German occupiers. Surely these, the killers and pillagers, were the ones who should be whispering in Don Federico’s ear on Saturday
afternoons. Why waste his time with the minor attentions that passed between Lieutenant Klaus Eisenmann and me?

How naive I was, and how easily I rationalized a schoolgirl crush that put everyone around me at risk.

The next day was Sunday, the day I was to meet Giorgio. I sat through our noon meal on the edge of my chair, cutting my meat extra slowly and setting my knife on the rim of the plate so it wouldn’t make a sound. Papa was going on about how the olive crop looked like it might be large, so he didn’t notice anything unusual, but Mother glanced over at me now and then and smiled.
That’s more like it,
I knew she was thinking.

Before mass, I had put on a full skirt and a pair of comfortable sandals in anticipation of the long walk to the gazebo. Mother had taken one look at me and shaken her head. “No. You will not go to church looking like one of the farmer’s daughters. Now go back to your room and come back out as a member of the Bellini family.”

“Mother,” I said, “I’m too old for you to be telling me what to wear.”